“The Winter’s Tale” from 1610 is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays. It really ought to be as well known as the play Shakespeare wrote after it, “The Tempest”, but strangely it is not. The Stratford Festival last staged the play in 1998 in a fine production directed by Brian Bedford. The current production directed by Marti Maraden is in some respects even better. If somehow you have never seen this play before, now is the time.

“The Winter’s Tale” was a great favourite of Canada’s venerated critic Northrop Frye. Of the 40 plays now attributed to Shakespeare, Frye always chose it as one of the ten he would teach in his legendary undergraduate introduction to Shakespeare. The reason why is that “The Winter’s Tale” demonstrates better than any other play by Shakespeare Frye’s theory of literature that relates literary genre to the four seasons--satire to winter, comedy to spring, romance to summer, and irony to winter. The first three acts of “The Winter’s Tale” exhibit all the main characteristics of satire--not the snide criticism you make think--but rather darkness, dissolution, the return of chaos and the defeat of the hero. The fourth act exemplifies spring with its character of rebirth and the fifth summer and a movement beyond happiness into the miraculous. Furthermore, this cycle of seasons and genres is controlled by time, who appears as a character in the play.

As in so many of his plays, Shakespeare confronts us with two contrasting worlds. In the “Henry IV” plays it is the court versus the tavern, in “As You Like It” the court versus the forest, in “King Lear” the world inside of castles versus the world out on the heath. In “The Winter’s Tale” we have the strict, colourless world of Sicilia versus the wild, colourful world of Bohemia. Leontes, King of Bohemia, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, were childhood friends until fate called them to their respective duties as heads of state. Polixenes, who have been visiting Leontes, says he must leave. Leontes, wishing him to prolong his stay by even a week, asks his wife Hermione to entreat Polixenes. When Polixenes gives in and agrees to stay, Hermione’s success sets off fit of madness in Leontes, that Shakespeare compares to an infection or disease, which suddenly afflicts Leontes with acute jealousy and paranoia. It is a crisis of faith in the most general sense. He believes his wife has been untrue to him with Polixenes, that the child she carries is his, and that his trusted servant Camillo is in league with them. When the oracle at Delphi confirms that all his suspicions are unfounded, he even withdraws his belief in the oracle, whereupon his son Mamillius and Hermione both die. Only then, now that his society has collapsed in chaos, does Leontes collapse in grief--all this before the third act has ended.

Before the end, we see how Antigonus, a member of Leontes‘ court, takes the infant Perdita, the child Hermione bore before her death, and exposes it to the elements as he promised the Leontes. Antigonus has chosen Sicilia as the place to leave Perdita based on Leontes‘ suspicions of her parentage. There, however, she is found by two shepherds who raise her for sixteen years when she catches the eye of Polixenes’ son Florizel, who plans to marry her despite his father’s opposition to the match because of the girl’s supposedly low origins. For those you do not know the play’s magical conclusion, I will not spoil it. And if you don’t know the play and plan to see it, I suggest you don’t spoil it for yourselves because it concludes with a scene unlike anything else in Shakespeare.

Marti Maraden direction and John Pennoyer’s design show that they are fully aware of the import of the play’s structure that Frye elucidates. The court of Sicilia is dressed all in greys and blacks, the men with 19th-century trousers and Renaissance-style tunics with long hanging sleeves that completely hide the arms when held at the side as if imprisoning them. The women wear flowing gowns suggesting a Renaissance interpretation of classical drapery and, metaphorically, a greater sense of freedom that have the men. In contrast, Bohemia is a riot of colour with ethnic garb alluding to everything from Anatolia to Mongolia, with each character wearing colour over colour and pattern over pattern. It’s too bad that Pennoyer makes the famous bear who pursues Antigonus look more like a velociraptor than a bear. It is supposed to be Sicilia not Jurassic Park.

The most problematic performance unexpectedly comes from Ben Carlson as Leontes. His gift for making Shaw’s paragraph-long sentences or Shakespeare’s most complex verse absolutely clear has always chimed with the penetrating intelligence of characters like John Tanner or Hamlet. Leontes is a kind of character Carlson has never played before--someone who goes mad and is unaware that he is mad. Carlson gives the mad Leontes’ broken speech the same clarity of line reading but the insight this implies contradicts the confusion he outwardly displays. Following the frequent comparisons in the text of Leontes’ fit to disease, Carlson looks to be in constant distress. In the first part of the play he needs to find a way to make his speech also reflect that distress. In the fifth act carlson is much more at home playing the chastened Leontes, who now now is overburdened with awareness of the cost of the deeds he committed in madness.

The other principal roles are all well played. Yanna McIntosh gives an exquisite performance as Hermione--vivacious before Leontes‘ madness and imbued with nobility through suffering after he repeated wrongs her. Seana McKenna is a powerful Paulina, eloquent in berating Leontes for his brutal actions yet sympathetic when he finally shows signs of sincere grief. Tom Rooney makes sense of the tricky role of Autolycus, the itinerant rogue and thief who represents art as deception. Dan Chameroy is a well-spoken Polixenes as is Ian Lake, who plays his rebellious son Florizel. Cara Ricketts is a delight as Perdita. Brian Tree uses his well-worn old man routine as the Old Shepherd while Mike Shara uses is goofy kid routine as the Young Shepherd.

One of the most noticeable features of the 2010 season is how few senior actors, either in experience or age, there are in the company. This deficiency leads to some less than ideal casting. As happened in last year’s “Phèdre”, Sean Arbuckle is again too young to play the role assigned him. Last year he was too young as Théramène to be a believable tutor to Jonathan Goad’s Hippolyte; now this year he is too young to be the trusty life-long counsellor Camillo to Carlson’s Leontes. As with Goad, he is about the same age. Arbuckle does have an appropriately calming voice, but he really should be the same age as Paulina. Randy Hughson, who is about 49, and is Paulina’s husband, should be even older, especially if he is double cast in the role of Time. It used to be that Stratford saved this role to showcase its most venerable actors, e.g. Butch Blake or William Needles. Hughson can put on an old-man voice for Time, but that does not have the same weight as someone whose voice has actually been heard for decades at the Festival. To make things worse, Maraden decides to have Time appear suspended in mid air and turn about, thus distracting us completely from one of the key speeches to understanding the play.

Bedford’s production in 1998 was heavily cut, including the discussion about flower hybridization between Perdita and Polixenes that is central to the play’s theme. This time we get to hear Polixenes important formulation: “This is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature.” Maraden does, however, cut the reference to Julio Romano as the sculptor of the stature of Hermione, which tends to eliminate one of the two possible explanations for the magical, something that with this reference Shakespeare deliberately makes ambiguous.

Both “As You Like It” and “The Winter’s Tale” are experimental plays--the first with virtually no action, the second an exploration of the relation of dramatic genres. “The Winter’s Tale” is the lesser known of the two, but should not be. If you have to choose between the two, “The Winter’s Tale” is by far the more effective and affecting production.